The Tattoo was just the start…

CHAPTER SEVEN

Doc Gordon’s Acid Birthday Jaunt

“You’ll forgive me Gordon, If I raise an eyebrow” I said.”Of course!” He chuckled “Nowadays we all know the dangers of the Excessive Behaviour Program”
“How is she now ?” I asked
“Oh, the old girl’s still bashing away on a broken typewriter in an empty attic somewhere. She calls herself a writer these days, And talking of the Excessive Behaviour Program, Do you remember …

Doc Gordon’s Acid Birthday Jaunt

The Bigman was there, waiting by the door, he had a fluorescent rucksack which he’d unpacked across the banquette by the window. He seemed to be checking things off of list “The spatial field of the derive (drifting) is determined by whether the activity is aimed at studying terrain or at emotional disorientation, tumbling through the fissures of the urban network. I have found that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have all reached the same level of consciousness, all with compatible goals and interests as social activities are distributed in distinct concentric circles.”
The three wise women were chattering, Jesus and Frankie were staring out into space for different reasons. The Doc swept into the bar, gothic in his plush velvet smoking-jacket. Mimi, Mary-Jane and Sonja wriggled around in their seats “By the pricking of our thumbs, something evil this way comes”. The Doc was on form “How now you secret, satanic, midnight hags! What is it you do?” “A deed without name” The wise women squealed in unison. The Doc was looking resplendent, handling his scrap of blotter with fine sharpened tweezers. As it was his birthday he was affecting the manner of Lord Byron, flicking his tumbling hair around with gesture reminiscent of the Bee Gees.
We necked the tabs in the gruesome Shopping Centre Tavern at eleven, Celtic crosses washed down with pints of Pesti-Cider. And then we began the long trek out to the woods. Shiftless, itching for action. A cold sweat sweeps over me. I open my eyes wider but the world whites out, bleaching into yellow. A reality slips and tumbles through the jittering, skittering jerks of my vision. Last year’s leaves rippled under our bare feet, like stepping on pebbles in a trickling stream. Spring sunshine glanced off wet leaves and streamed through the showers of light rain. The three wise women were scrambling around on a huge tree stump, nibbling at toadstools and fungi they’d found in the woods.
We shambled onward until the forest ended abruptly at a five bar gate. We settled down. The Bigman pulled a thermos flask of hot coffee from his rucksack and began sharing it out. Mimi, Mary-Jane and Sonja were disappearing into the forest, “Where are you going? when will we meet you again?” the Doc called after them. They were chanting “When the hurley-burley’s done, when the battle’s lost and won” “At sunset?” he yelled hopefully “That will be at the set of the sun, when the hurley-burley’s done, upon the heath, I come Graymalkin, ah pook calls, let us away, away anon anon anon anon” and on. They were naked from the waists up smeared in mud or faecal matter, whooping like gibbons, clambering the trees, one of them was being Tank Girl, “BLAM! BLAMBLAM! BLAM!, you’re all dead, now I’m going to fuck a kangeroo…” By now they were totally out of sight, just their deranged howling could be heard in the distance.

“Over here, look!” called Jesus. He was standing in the entrance to a high boxwood maze. Fine blue spring sky, torn in two by the white slash of exhaust emissions, the sound of a passenger jet sears through the air. And we spin off, around in the maze’s concentric spirals of ancient boxwood hedges. We turn confusing circles, doublebacks and alleys and concealed gateways, an inscribed spinning mandala of curiosity and desire. Images shift sense under the scissors images to sound to smell to sight, hedges and pathways leading on to others, gates secreted behind overgrowths of vine, that creak into gardens behind walls, twisting misleading labyrinths catacombs and more. Culminating breathless in a flicker of strange recognition and slip right here out into an enclosed green at the very centre of the maze. Edging the green two rows of once-topiaried Yew trees stood opposing each other, giant forgotten chess pieces. The still heart of the wheel of the universe, which has ceased its motion, the timeless hub of the cosmos. A fluttering from inside one of the yews. Quietly we back away now, infringed on some hidden secret of nature, we’ll pass this way again. we fumble back through the maze.
Suddenly there was a woman from nowhere.
“Go Away!” she screamed at us “Get off my property !” She was waving her arms around. We vaulted the five bar gate in one leap and ran. The mud track skirted the forest and spread out into the lush rolling green landscape of a golf course. The continuous hum of the motorway in the distance hung in the air like lead. We sat in a copse on the edge of the links, the Bigman divided up the kendal mintcake. Then he led us over the hills. Almost invisible pinpricks of light flittering in front of my eyes, like freezing mist or a heat haze shimmering distortion of reality. Granules of light flow in and out of almost three dimensional patterns.

At the edge of the motorway the Bigman paused “It’s raining” was all he said. Then he pulled a fluorescent yellow kagoule from his rucksack. In the fading light, he strode like a giant phosphorescent chicken into the middle of the motorway. And he held up the traffic, that we, the lost empty-headed dregs of humanity might cross the awesome motorway, unharmed. Pretty soon we fell into a village pub, and sat for hours, without buying drinks, giggling at the psychick deformity of the horrified locals.
Moments of disembodied reality float, star-like across my itching eyes.
The wide paved avenue of high class shops swept up the incline to the great glass temple. In the blue spring night the gleaming crystal shopping city crouched like a cockroach, burned a thousand thousand kW palace of holy materialism.
The Doc was bent double, convulsed with laughter, Frankie was striding around with his arms outstretched cruciform. He was proclaiming himself to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and claimed he could see the light of the God Consumerism shining through the holes in his palms.

Another time, sitting unshaven in hospital issue pyjamas in a smoke-filled visiting room, wild-eyed in the throes of his confused sickness, he recalled that night “Satan, he touched me, I accepted the touch of Satan that night in the forest, he held me down and I succumbed to the devil, he made the church appear in the air at the end of the road, only because I took the touch of Satan……etc”
I remember I gazed out of the window, remembering that night, wishing I could find my way back…

The Bigman suddenly threw himself to his knees and weeping in awful gut-wrenching sobs he babbled friend Cornwall accident coracle collision lavabread lavabread johnny johnny lavabread hunting mammoth with his prehistoric flint knife there is no future in englands dreaming. “One last pint at the Shopping Centre Tavern” The Doc was declaring, but I couldn’t answer I was looking over his shoulder at the Shopping Centre lurking like a giant waiting insect, straddling the railway tracks as if it ate trains for breakfast. I was already turning on my heels “I left something by the stream” I shouted over my shoulder. “What fucking stream ??!!” I heard the Doc’s voice echo through the plate glass and steel.

The stream, the deep narrow stream in midsummer, a small stone bridge arches high casting a clean solid reflection on to the rippling water. The banks rising gently in a smooth rich green of mosses and grasses. I’m lying on my back, sunlight flittering over my eyelids. I’m not sleeping. My pushbike and sleeping bag abandoned, my rucksack thrown aside. I’ve been in the water, my bare feet glisten sunlit spectrums. I’m not moving, I’m not sleeping, I remember the last time I’d felt like this, At the doc’s lecture tour, way back when….

“Once named as Camberwell’s very own acid guru and branded nationally by the media as a menace to society, he’s become the darling of the daytime TV circuit and is well known across the south eastern television network as the psychedelic agony aunt.
“Now returning from his successful nation wide tour and promotion of his by-now infamous treatise on the validity of the drug-induced state of spiritual illumination.
“Ladies and gentlemen please be upstanding for the irrepressible”
Somebody behind me muttered irresponsible more like !
“Doctor Gordon Tripp…………..

“The purpose of this lecture serves two purposes, in essence, two diverse strands which are balanced over a third strand.
In effect this lecture serves two functions, which in their turn necessitate a third purpose.
The act of giving this lecture.
The actuation of the two purposes is manifest in the existence of the third. That is to say, the living experience of this lecture. Hence this lecture is the first report from my lavatory-sized book-lined bedsit-cum-laboratory in Camberwell South London. Where I am conducting my research into altered states of consciousness.
This lecture is entitled:The pursuit of the mystic experience through the use of self-induced altered states of consciousness
For the purposes of the lecture I shall regard Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs) as any mental state induced by various physiological, psychological or pharmacological manoeuvres or agents which can be recognised subjectively by the individual themselves as representing a sufficient deviation in subjective experience or psychological functioning from certain general norms, for that individual, during alert, waking consciousness.
My mainline of enquiry is into those ASCs induced by recreational drugs. Words like grace and transfiguration come to mind and as an adherent to the Cut-up methodology I am forced at this point to change my style of address. Since every individual is the victim of the linguistic tradition into which they were born, which only serves to confirm the belief that reduced consciousness is the only consciousness, I shall be freeing the word from the dictates of conventional meaning, as is only appropriate to the subject in hand.
Let me say at the outset, that our normal consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie other potential forms of consciousness entirely. Daydreaming, sleeping, Abreactive or cathartic techniques, peyote, ether, CO2, Amyl Nitrate, Metamphetamine,LSD-25, dream states, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, hysterical states of disassociation, pharmacologically induced mental aberrations, trance states experienced during prolonged masturbation and chemically induced hyperalert trance states.
I took my pill at eleven.
In some cases the psychological regressions found in ASCs will prove to be atavistic and harmful. While in other instances they enable a person to transcend the bounds of logic and formality in order to express needs and desires in a socially sanctioned and constructive way. The function of the brain is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of knowledge.
Throughout history the production of ASCs has played a major role in various healing arts and practices. Shamans may lapse into trance or possession states in order to diagnose the aetiology of their patients ailments or to learn of specific remedies or healing practices. It is my thesis that the very presence and prevalence of ASCs in humankind attests to their importance in his everyday functioning.
In the realm of religion, the Altered States of Consciousness associated with sexual orgasm may be considered as another beneficial alteration, and appears in a major role in various healing arts and practices. Suggestible mental states produced by grilling tactics and brainwashing states. Shamans may lapse into trance or possession states in order to diagnose the aetiology of their patient’s ailments or to learn of specific remedies or hyperkinetic healing practice trances, associated with emotional contagion encountered in a group or mob setting, also intense prayer.
The widespread occurrence and use of mystical and possession states and passive meditation throughout the production history of Altered States of Consciousness has played a major role in various healing arts, aesthetic and creative experiences. Thereby indicating that Altered States of Consciousness satisfy many needs both for humanity, society, religious conversion and healing trance experiences during revivalistic meetings.
Shamans may lapse into trance or possession states. The needs of society are met through its vicarious identification with the entranced individual who not only derives satisfaction from the divine possession but also acts out certain ritualised group conflicts and aspirations.
Shamans may lapse into trance or possession states in order to diagnose the aetiology of their patients ailments or to learn of specific remedies or healing practices.
It is my thesis that the very presence and prevalence of Altered States of Consciousness in humankind attests to their importance in day to day revelatory and prophetic states.
The widespread occurrence and use of mystical and possession states and mental aberrations associated with certain rites of passage, spirit possession states, shamanistic and prophetic trance states during ceremonies, firewalking, mystical and transcendental experience.
During the actual treatment or healing ceremony the shaman, Hunan, medicine man, The Normal temple priest, preacher, physician or psychiatrist may view the production of Altered States of Consciousness as a crucial pre-requisite for healing. Mental aberrations associated with certain rites of passage, spirit possession states, shamanistic and prophetic trance states during ceremonies, firewalking trances, ordered religious conversion and orgiastic trance such as experienced by the howling or pharmacologically induced whirling dervishes have also played a major role in the healing arts.
Aesthetic and creative experiences indicates that Altered States of Consciousness satisfy many needs both for humanity and society.
ASCs may be regarded, indeed.
It is my thesis that the very presence and prevalence of Altered States of Consciousness in humankind attests to their importance in this everyday functioning.
The widespread occurrence and use of mystical and possession states and aesthetic and creative experiences indicates that ASCs satisfy many needs both for humanity and society trance states experienced during prolonged masturbation and chemically induced hyperalert trance states during their famous dance.
Despite the numerous clinical and research reports, Altered States of Consciousness may be regarded as dictates that satisfy many needs both for humanity and society.
So there has been little attempt to organise this scattered information into a bunch of flowers basking in their own inner light. It is my thesis that the very presence and prevalence of Altered States of Consciousness in humankind attests to their importance in this everyday functioning:
The needs of society are met through its vicarious identification with the entranced individual who not only derives satisfaction from the divine possession but also acts out certain ritualised group conflicts and aspirations.
There seems to be an optimal range of exteroceptive stimulation necessary for the maintenance of normal waking consciousness, and levels of stimulation either above or below this range appear conducive to the production of Altered States of Consciousness, when such stimulus is missing mental aberrations Care likely to occur. The widespread occurrence and use of qu mystical and possession states and aesthetic and creative experiences in homeAltered States x of Consciousness PZ the doc’s lectureQasc Ffunctions.docÿCOSymbolSymbol. The function of the brain desires in a socially sanctioned and constructive way. Word WordDoc Word.Doc.8 Normal.dot soft Word 80 Normal Times Default Default Para FoBody Text Normal Body Text Times New t Roman SymbolED
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Altered States of Consciousness may be experienced in excitatory states resulting primarily from a sensory overload or bombardment, which may or may not be accompanied by strenuous physical activity or exertion.
Altered States of Consciousness may be produced in any setting by a wide range of agents or manoeuvres which interface with the normal outflow of the inflow of the emotional tone of the normal flow and organisation of cognitive processes.
Profound emotional arousal and mental fatigue may be major contributing factors. We also find that varified and diversified environmental stimulation appears necessary for the maintenance of normal cognitive perceptual and emotional experience, and that when such stimulus is missing mental aberrations are likely to occur.
Altered States of Consciousness may be produced in any setting by a wide range of agents or manoeuvres which interface with the normal outflow of the inflow of the emotional tone of the normal flow and organisation of cognitive processes.

Take for example this account of the effects of Mescaline : ASCs may be regarded as ‘common pathways’ for many different forms of human expression and experience. In some cases the psychological regressions found in Altered States of Consciousness will prove to be atavistic and harmful. While in other instances they enable a person to transcend the bounds of logic and formality in order to express needs and desires in a socially sanctioned and constructive way. ASCs may be regarded as ‘common pathways’ for many different forms of human expression and experience. There seem to be an optimal range of normal waking consciousnesses.

Take for example this account of the effects of Mescaline : Half an hour after taking the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights beneath the thin veneer of human consciousness lies a relatively uncharted realm of mental activity, the nature name and function of which have been neither systematically explored nor adequately conceptualised. The altered state of consciousness associated with sexual orgasm may be considered as another beneficial mental alteration. There were sumptuous red swelling surfaces, expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing patterned life.
The closing of my eyes revealed a complex of grey structures within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity, sliding off noiselessly upwards, out of sight! Pink eyed albino cardinal genuflects east, then west, his head bursting into a giant purple chrysanthemum.
No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite unregarded.
I took my pill at eleven.
The beatific vision. Being-Awareness-Bliss. Resonating Peace Healing Emanating.
Plato could not have visualised a bunch of flowers on the morning of creation. The dharma body of the Buddha was these flowers, is anything that I or rather not-I released for a moment from my throttling embrace cared to look at. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as that I had seen. As I looked at the chair I can only describe the sacramental vision of reality. The legs of that chair! How miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes, or was it centuries? not merely gazing at those legs, but actually being them. Or rather being myself in them, or to be still more accurate, being my Not-self in the Not-self that was the chair. When I got up and walked about I could do so quite normally.
An hour and a half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. I could of course have looked at my watch, but my watch I knew was in another universe.
Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has happened to them and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.
In the final stages of egolessness there is an obscure knowledge that all is in all – that all is actually each.
So in conclusion, dare I say more? and anyway, ultimately the two purposes manifest in the existence of the third, that is to say, the living experience of this lecture. Are there any questions from the floor?”

I was lying on my back wet with last year’s peaty fallen leaves, gazing at a web of tree branches heavy with new growth, swaying in the breeze silhouetted against the sunlit sky. They spanned around the doc’s face leering down at me. “Are there any questions from the floor?” He demanded, taking my hand and pulling me to my feet.

I awoke, it was dark, there was nobody around. I walked in darkness towards a light gleam in the sky, the light-ghost of the shopping centre. I found myself at the gaping mouth of a subway. One fluorescent light flickered on and off randomly. Everything looked so green, under dirty water green, I was obsessed with my skin greying in subterranean sick light, I had fear, of jaundice, of hepatitis, of diseases that putrefy the organs and the skin. I pass by. I spin off, around in a maze’s concentric spirals of ancient boxwood hedges. I turn confusing circles, doublebacks and alleys and concealed gateways, an inscribed spinning mandala of curiosity and compulsion. Images shift sense under the scissors images to sound to smell too out of sight, a five bar gate, hedges and pathways leading on to others, gates secreted behind overgrowths of vine, that creak into gardens behind walls twisting misleading labyrinths catacombs and more. Culminating breathless in a flicker of strange recognition and slip right here out into an enclosed green at the very centre of the maze. Edging the green two rows of once-topiaried yew trees stood opposing each other, giant forgotten chess pieces. A fluttering from inside one of the trees, the sound of a man.
I am gliding forward, it is late, after midnight, I am alone, wearing only the flimsiest white cotton robe, reaching to the floor, the unexpected heat from the spring day only now cooling off. And I am moving through the centre of an isolated maze towards the sound of another human being.
I am curious, I am drawn, through the darkness, through the trees, under branches into the hidden labyrinths between and under. “Bella, Bella”. The sound of a man, the voice of Jesus, the shoeshine boy.
There I was, almost naked except for a flimsy white cotton robe, confronted with Jesus himself, naked and willing. And I succumbed, I fell to my knees before that man. Yes, it’s true, I confess all, sisters, I, too, have shagged with Jesus. He who saves the souls of lost women. Yes, I have sat on Jesus’ face, and given him head before breakfast, and yes! I have done the lot! Shagged and sucked and fucked that Jesus man. And he loved it, he loved every second of it, Dirty old man!…
The phone rings. The ansafone picks up the message.
The light fades back down into the dark shapes of the yew trees. Under the big full moon human animals clenched together, mewing in sexual pleasure, clothes and contraceptives thrown aside. The trees bristle with the deep secrets of nature. We fumbled back through the maze. Jesus leads me and we sit down on an iron bridge over the railway line to watch the sun rise over the fields. We were together, joined waiting for the diurnal (what does this word mean?) solar miracle and in that moment we beget hundreds of spirit daughters on the other side, each one of his psychic sperm finding refuge in my welcoming psychic ova. We litter the blue dawn sky with sprays of starlet daughters, each one as breathtaking as a lemon sunrise, each as deep as bloody sunset.
We spoke about sunrise to fill in the time in slow, spun out universe-long seconds I heard the whole of existence wake and spin and sing.
And we spoke about sunset, while we waited for the day to dawn.
J says “I knew a wise woman in Spain who sat every evening on her balcony smoking her one pipe of the day watching the sun set..”

And Jesus on sunrise
“A transformation over the slow and steady throb of time, like watching a sunrise and seeing the unrelenting turning of the planet in space.”

A stillness dropped over us, a global anticipation of sunrise, time paused, charmed and spellbound. Cracking open with the snickering shrieks of quail as they rise, startled, from the surface of the inky lake.
Jesus lifted a cobalt blue jewel up to the horizon, but all we saw there were the huntsmen skirt the edge of the copse with their terriers, bringing death with the dawn.

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Thee Twisted Times Ov Bella Basura

Underground novel. First Published in serialised paper format. Stapled A5 double-sided. 1996. First Published in book form 1998. Currently available online and being prepared to be published in e-book format.

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